This iOS 6/A6 Jailbreak Contest Is a Scam, Says Hacker Updated

@i0n1c (Stefan Esser) points to a new attempt to scam the JB community

Stefan Esser tweet

JailbreakMatrix.com says it is attempting to raise a cool million to provide an incentive for the Dev Team hackers to come up with an exploit for iOS 6 / A6 jailbreak. The only problem is that the very hackers cited by the blog are calling fake on this one [updated, see below].

Mario Dabek writing for what appears to be a legitimate jailbreak-centric blog says, “I have faith in the Dev teams and their tools, this is not an issue, but they need help finding the BOOTROM/USERLAND exploit, and the process is stalling.”

“We need to do something,” he says, adding “everyone can pitch in a buck or two to the grand prize.”

Dabek explains that with roughly ten million jailbroken devices out there, getting a prize together should be a walk in the park.

“If 1/10th of the users donate $1 each, we should have a million dollar prize. If the money is there, the incentive is there. More money = more exposure = more people who will try to crack the code. Pretty simple,” he explains.

Making it sound as if renowned hackers are condoning the contest, he calls out to anyone who believes they can come up with an exploit saying pod2g (Cyril) will need to verify the hack first.

“Your exploit must be verified by @pod2G and implemented into one of the Jailbreak Software Packages (Redsn0w, sn0wbreeze, greenpois0n, etc ), which every comes first A5 or A6 exploit, will get the whole prize,” writes Dabek.

The post does seem legitimate, but there really isn’t any evidence that the money is going in a safe place. And Stefan Esser thinks the same.

A well-known figure within the jailbreak community, Esser (@i0n1c on Twitter), sent out the following tweet just minutes ago: “Oh god... Another attempt to scam the JB community for money,” he said, while also including a link to the post in question.

Update: Mr. Dabek has contacted us to clarify that his initiative was, in fact, legitimate. However, due to vocal concerns from hackers Musclenerd and i0n1c, there has been some confusion regarding its legitimacy. To clarify, Dabek's iOS 6 jailbreak contest is not a scam.

Mr. Dabek chose to suspend the contest stating, "Due to the concerns posted by Musclenerd and ion1c , we have to stop the contest, as it will actually hurt and delay the current JB progress."